Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) (9 page)

Chapter 14

“Wake up, damn you, lawdog!”

Someone was none-too-gently slapping Longarm's cheeks. The voice and the slaps brought him back to a world of pain and torment in his left temple. At first, he couldn't remember what had put it there, but then he remembered the split pine log arcing toward him. And the pain that followed as he tumbled into a well of hot tar at the bottom of which waited a little man with a hammer.

The little man, grinning, had set to work hammering away at Longarm's head until Longarm was sure that the little fucker had broken through the bone and was whacking his exposed brain.

“I said wake up, damn you, star packer!”

“All right, all right,” Longarm heard himself mumble drunkenly, trying to open his eyes.

When he got them open he saw a fist barreling toward him so quickly that he barely had time to take in the broad fingers and bulging knuckles bristling with gray-brown hair, the grimy thumb drawn up tight against the middle one, before it rammed against his chin. He gave a groan as the blow sent him straight back to the floor with another hard blow to his noggin.

It was then he realized he was in a chair. Tied to it with ropes that were cutting into his wrists. On his back like this, he could feel the planks across the back digging into him, the hard, hide-bottom seat digging into his thighs.

He opened his eyes again, grinding his teeth with pain and fury.

Harcourt Greer stared down at him, grinning, showing several gaps in his jaws. His lone eye was still staring as though in bizarre fascination at the end of his nose. The other frosty blue one bored into Longarm.

“If there's anything I hate more than a lawman, I sure don't know what it is.” Greer moved chaw around in his mouth.

May's head, her hair pulled back severely from her big, bland, blunt-nosed face. Her eyes were pinched and dark. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet.”

Another face appeared in Longarm's field of vision. This one belonged to Lacy. There couldn't have been more of a contrast between hers and Greer's and May's. Her shiny hair hung down, casting her cheeks in shadow. She wore her heavy coat and her hat, as though she were ready to go somewhere.

“Don't kill him,” she said. “Let's leave him for Heck Gunn and Cruz. They'll take their time with him, kill him sloooowwww.” She formed a red circle with her mouth, then smiled like an angel but with a devil's eyes. “Buyin' us more time to get to those saddlebags before they can.”

“I'd sure like to kill him,” Greer said, running the back of his hand across his mouth hungrily. “I purely would like to drill a bullet through his head, Missy Lacy!”

“Do as Lacy says,” May said. “She knows best. Good head on her, that girl.”

“Ah, hell,” Greer said, slapping the woman's arm. “Got some other things mighty good on her, eh, May?”

“Shut up, damn you, Harcourt! I done told you how many times to shut your goddamn trap about that?”

“Be quiet, both of you!” Lacy said. “Get finished packing so we can hit the trail as soon as some light shows!”

When Greer and May had disappeared from Longarm's field of vision, Lacy knelt down beside him, gazing at him smugly. “It could have been you, helpin' me go after the money. But, no, you had to be so damn obstinate. Had to be the man of integrity.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Now, I'm gonna have to cut up the take four ways instead of two.”

“I do apologize.”

“Tsk, tsk.”

“Who are those two, anyways? They ain't really ranchers and woodcutters, are they?”

She smiled again, delighted with her wicked ways. “May said they're from Texas. Bank robbers mostly. They was just hidin' out up here, pretending they were salt-of-the-earth settlers 'cause the Rangers are after 'em.”

“We was getting' bored, though,” May said as she shoved foodstuffs into a bag on the kitchen table. “We was born bad, Harcourt an' me. Felix was just naturally born bad, too.”

The big woman shook her head. “It wasn't hard for dear Lacy to convince me we should throw in with her, go after the loot she hid from Gunn and Cruz.” She glanced at Harcourt, who was rummaging around in the drawers of a sideboard near the stairs, tossing ammo boxes on top of it, near a pair of open saddlebags. “If we ever get out of here. Gonna be light soon, Harcourt! Where's that worthless spawn of yours?”

“I told ya, May—he's saddlin' the mounts. Now shut up so I can hear myself think over here!”

*   *   *

“You just lay there and think about it, Longarm. Been nice knowin' you.” Lacy touched a finger to her lips, then pressed it to Longarm's. It was wet. Even through the throbbing in his head he could feel the wetness on his own lips and felt a shudder of desire, however slight and eerie.

It angered him. He gritted his teeth and fought against the ropes, but they only burned deeper into his wrists. He rocked from side to side, but his ankles were tied taut to the chair legs, as well, so he wasn't going anywhere.

The struggle kicked up the throbbing in his temple and now in the back of his head, as well, and it nauseated him. So he wouldn't throw up while lying on his back and choke on it, he lay there, sucking air in and out of his lungs and waiting for the pain to lessen.

Lacy went out, and then May slung a couple of croaker sacks over her back and went out behind her.

A few minutes later, Harcourt Greer stood over Longarm, grinning, holding a pair of saddlebags over one shoulder, a Winchester rifle in his hands. On his hips were two pistols—the Smith & Wesson Longarm had seen on him earlier, and a long-barreled Colt in a holster strapped to the man's thigh. “Like I said, I hate nothin' worse than a goddamned lawman. Rangers hung my oldest boy and two of his cousins. Hanged my wife, too.”

“I can certainly understand, then,” Longarm said wryly.

“I'd put a bullet through your ears if it wasn't for Miss Lacy and the money. Wouldn't wanna do nothin' to get on her bad side.” Greer winked. “Until May and Felix an' me get the money, that is.”

He cackled, choked, and spat chaw at Longarm, who turned his head so that he merely felt a wetness on his ear as it splattered onto the floor. Then he stomped on out of the cabin, leaving the door hanging wide behind him.

Another wave of rage swept through Longarm, like a wildfire through dry woods. He rocked from side to side, trying to loosen the ropes around his wrists and ankles, but again the hemp only bit deeper into his skin. The exertion made bright roses blossom in his eyes. He ground his teeth against the railroad sparks of fiery pain being rammed through his ears.

He felt like a turtle on its back, unable to right itself. He could only lie here now, hoping the pain died, hoping he could figure a way out of this ridiculous fix she'd gotten him into again. Shortly, he heard horses snorting, hooves clomping, bridle chains jangling. He looked through the open door, saw in the dim, floury light of the predawn three horses and May's mule clomp past the cabin and head off down the trail toward the river.

Longarm growled like a wounded wolf. Like a wounded wolf in a leg trap. He had to get after Lacy and her new accomplices. Bring them down before they found the money and lit out for who knew where.

And he had to get there ahead of Gunn and Cruz. Well ahead. He was outnumbered on both sides, and the last thing he needed was to get caught in a cross fire.

Resting back against the floor, squeezing his eyes shut against the throbbing in his head aggravated by his frustration, he thought, Why not just let them all kill each other? Then, when the smoked cleared, he could take the loot back to Jawbone, and his troubles would be over.

But he couldn't bank on the two factions killing all of each other. One or two could very well make off with the money. And . . .
Christ, could he really be thinking this?
 . . . part of him wanted to save Lacy not only from Gunn and Cruz but from herself. He didn't want her to die.

What part of him wanted to save her?

Stupid question.

When he felt the throbbing in his head begin to abate, he looked around and thought hard on how he was going to separate himself from the chair. The ropes wouldn't give. He knew that from the slick, oily blood oozing around them. Fighting them had only cause them to tear into his skin, make him bleed. Since he couldn't get out of the ropes, he had to break the chair apart.

How?

He pondered the question. An answer came to him.

He groaned against it.
This is gonna hurt.

It did.

Wriggling his shoulders and hips, he managed to roll to the door. He paused there, catching his breath, sweat breaking out all over his body and basting his balbriggans against him like a second, faded-red skin. Then he drew a deep breath and managed to wriggle and roll his way through the open door, then across the stoop and down the porch's five steps.

As he boom-boom-boomed down the steps, he thrust all his weight against the chair until, when he ended up in the yard, he'd busted the back off the chair, and he'd busted the bottom of the chair into two ragged parts. His ankles and wrists were free of the chair and each other, though rope was still tied around each.

Rising, breathing hard through gritted teeth, with that little man busting into his brain in earnest with his angry hammer, he looked around.

It was full dawn though the sun was not yet above the eastern mountains. So far, Longarm appeared to be alone. The ropes were still cutting into his wrists and ankles, but the knots were too tight to untie, so he stumbled barefoot into the cabin, found a rusty paring knife in a peach crate, and sawed through each of the ropes, ignoring the blood oozing out of the cuts in his wrists and ankles.

He had bigger fish to fry.

As quickly as he could in his agonized condition, he dressed and pulled his boots on, wincing at the pain in his ankles as he did. He wrapped his gun belt and holster around his waist, though Greer had taken his pistol. He intended to get it back soon.

Setting his hat gingerly on his head, Longarm looked around the cabin. He doubted Greer and May would have left any weapons lying around. The only knife he'd seen was the little knife he'd cut the ropes with. Deciding he'd have to head after Lacy and her cohorts unarmed, with possibly Gunn and Cruz on his trail, he wobbled out of the cabin, clamping a hand over the goose egg on his temple and hoping Greer had left a horse behind.

As he stepped onto the veranda, frustration bit him once more. The gate of the breaking corral left of the cabin hung open, as did the gate of the paddock off the barn to Longarm's right. Both corrals were empty, and there was no riding stock anywhere in sight.

He cursed and stumbled down the steps and past the remains of his chair, heading toward the barn, and stopped suddenly. Rumbling sounded. He turned to look past the ranch portal. Dust broiled over the trail in the direction of the river. He could see horseback riders jouncing beneath the dust.

Longarm cursed again, looked around wildly, closing his left hand over his holster as though trying to conjure his pistol by will alone. He looked back toward the trail. He could see faces beneath the hat now, which meant they could probably see him, too. Wheeling, he ran back up the porch steps and stopped just inside the cabin door, staring up the trail.

He was almost certain that the hellions thundering toward him were Gunn and Cruz even before he saw Gunn's top hat and spectacles and Cruz's sombrero and short leather jacket beneath crisscrossed cartridge belts. He pulled his head back inside and closed the door. His heart thudded, making the goose egg pulse like a miniature heart, making his eyes water.

He stared out the dusty, grimy window left of the door and watched Gunn and Cruz gallop beneath the portal and into the yard, a small pack of more riders behind them. Their horses were blowing hard. They'd probably been whipping up a furious pace since the first wash of dawn, wanting to get to the place on the river they'd last seen Longarm and Lacy.

The tracks from the river had likely led them here.

Longarm looked around quickly. A poker rested in a box by the cold fireplace. He grabbed it, hefted it. It wasn't much, but it was all he had. If he had to, he'd give at least one of Gunn's crew one hell of a headache.

As the gang drew to a halt in front of the cabin, their dust broiling up around them in the weak morning light, their horses' breath jetting in the cool air, they all looked around the place before Gunn turned his bespectacled countenance toward the cabin and said, “If anyone's in there, get the fuck out here now! My name is Heck Gunn, and I'm here on business.
Blood
business!”

“Si!”
said his amigo Orlando Cruz, chuckling devilishly beneath his bowler hat and drawing a long-barreled Colt from a holster thonged low on his thigh.

Chapter 15

Longarm stayed back away from the window while edging a look around the corner of it, squeezing the iron poker in his hand, pondering the grim situation.

One thing was for sure—he couldn't allow Gunn and Cruz to trap him in the cabin. He had to get outside and find a good place to hide, though in the back of his shrewd mind he was also trying to come up with a way of securing one of their horses.

How in the hell was he going to accomplish that without getting himself killed? As he stared out the window at the milling gang, a wry grin quirked his mouth corners as the seed of an idea blossomed. Likely a foolish idea that would get him killed, but at least he wouldn't die like a rat in a cage . . .

When Gunn glanced back at the men behind him, and they began dismounting, Longarm ran to the back of the cabin. He opened the back door behind the stairs, stepped outside, and pulled the door closed behind him. He looked around. There was about sixty yards of rocks and scrub pines between the cabin and the mountain wall behind it. About forty yards out from the cabin was a privy.

He ran for it, hearing himself groan as a meat cleaver of pain stabbed through his head. He glanced over each shoulder, spying two of the gang members walking from the front of the cabin toward the barn just north of it, both holding rifles up high across their chest. He fairly salivated at the prospect of getting his hands on one of those long guns.

He came to the privy and dashed behind it, pressing his back to the back wall and turning his head to one side. Two sets of boot thuds rose on the other side, in the direction of the cabin. He could hear someone—it sounded like Gunn—yelling inside the cabin itself, boots pounding the puncheons, spurs rattling raucously.

“Anything?” a man said.

“Nothin' so far,” said another. Longarm did not look around the privy but from their voices he knew they were at the back of the cabin, probably between it and the privy.

Silence.

The sun just now rose above the eastern ridge, spreading a warm, buttery light over the forest, thinning the shadows of the pines and firs. Birds began peeping and chortling.

Longarm heard the grind of pebbles under boots, the soft ching of spurs. “Tracks here, Cooter,” said one of the men behind the cabin.

The other man didn't say anything. The grinding of boots on gravel grew louder as both men moved toward the privy. One of them whispered just loudly enough for Longarm to hear: “Stay here—cover me. I'm gonna check it out.”

Longarm pressed his back against the privy, squeezing the handle of the poker in his right hand. His heart beat regularly. He could feel it like a needle prodding the lump on his temple courtesy of May. One of the men was moving toward him, then stopped. There was the scrape of the privy door opening quickly, leather hinges creaking. Through the planks behind him, Longarm could hear the cutthroat breathing.

“Nothin' in here,” he said, voice echoing hollowly inside the privy. “Gonna check around the back. Stay here so he don't try to slip around on me.”

“Got it,” said the other man.

Longarm listened to the soft foot thuds. They were coming from the opposite side of the privy from where he was standing. Slowly, he walked toward that side, raising the fireplace poker above his head.

He stopped at the very edge of the privy, holding his breath. As he heard the faint crunch of gravel from just around the corner, he squeezed the poker, tensed both arms. He heard the faint whistling of the approaching man's breath leaving his nose, and then he saw the very front of his black hat brim. When he saw the Indian-beaded band around the hat's crown, and the barrel of the Winchester, he swung the poker down hard.

It crushed the hat and plowed into the skull beneath it with a soft crunching sound.

“Uh,” said the man with the crushed skull as Longarm released the poker, grabbed the Winchester's barrel, and jerked it free of the dying man's hands.

As the dying man's knees buckled and hit the ground with a loud thump, the other man shouted, “Langen!”

Longarm pulled the Winchester back behind the outhouse. The gun was cocked and ready. Hearing the other man's running footsteps, Longarm stepped out from behind the outhouse and over the dead man. Aiming the rifle straight out from his right hip, he fired just as the other man—short and beefy and with a naked girl tattooed on his forehead—ran up to the privy's opposite corner. The man gave a grunt as he stopped suddenly, eyes widening, and brought up his own carbine but not before Longarm blasted out his heart with two well-placed .44 rounds.

The reports screeched around the ranch yard.

The other man triggered his carbine wide as he stumbled backward, dropped the Winchester, and fell hard on his ass, dead before the back of his head hit the ground. Wasting no time, Longarm leaped over the spasming stocky gent and ran around the cabin's left rear corner. He jacked a fresh shell into the carbine's breech as he bolted up the side of the cabin. He ran out into the yard fronting the stoop, to where one bearded man stood holding the horses' reins. The man tensed when he saw the lawman, and he started to raise the carbine he held down low in his right hand.

Longarm fired from the hip once more. The bearded gent dropped the horse's reins and stumbled straight backward, both eyes rolling up in their sockets as though to inspect the quarter-sized hole in the middle of his forehead. Even before he dropped, Longarm lurched forward to grab the reins of a prancing coyote dun.

As he poked his boot through a stirrup, he looked around quickly to see several men running toward him from various points around the yard. Boots thundered inside the cabin, and Longarm jerked a look over his shoulder to see a man with long, curly red hair and a red bowler hat bolting out the cabin door and onto the stoop, wielding two silver-chased Buntline Specials.

“What the
fuck
?” he shouted, eyes finding Longarm and blazing as he raised both poppers.

Longarm set the barrel of his carbine across his left forearm and fired once, twice, three times, blowing the red-haired man back inside the cabin and triggering the Buntlines into the ceiling. The eight horses scattered in all directions, trailing their reins, as Longarm threw down on one cutthroat running at him from his left and ground his heels into the coyote dun's flanks. The dun gave a shrill whinny, buck-kicked, and lunged into a long-legged gallop toward the ranch portal.

Longarm's two rounds blew up dirt to either side of the man running from his left, causing the man to wheel, run back in the direction he'd come from, and dive over a stock trough just as Longarm's third round blew up water inside it. As the lawman crouched low in the saddle and gave the angry dun its head, he shoved the carbine into the dun's saddle boot and glanced over his shoulder. Gunn and Cruz's men were running in circles in front of the cabin, shouting after their fleeing horses.

Gunn himself ran toward Longarm, shouting something that the lawman couldn't hear above the thudding and blowing of the galloping dun, but the man's tone told Longarm that he must have confiscated Gunn's own horse. The man snapped off several rifle rounds, but the bullets blew up dust short and wide. And then Longarm and the dun were hustling around a broad bend in the trail, and the pines closed off his view of the ranch and the enraged outlaws.

“Whew!” he said, glad to be out of there.

But tempering his relief was the continuous ache in his head. The pain spasms were in time with each lunge of the dun, and while he wanted to slow the mount to save them both, he had to put some distance between himself and the gang and then try to cover his trail so they couldn't follow him. He needed to lose them and catch up to Lacy and the Greers, but that would be all the more problematic with the enraged Heck Gunn breathing down his neck.

When he got to the river, he checked the dun and looked around. Obviously, he couldn't return to the San Juan valley, where Lacy had hid the loot, the same way he'd come. But there must have been a horse trail through the rugged peaks along both sides of it, because Gunn and Cruz had managed to follow them and even get ahead of them. Maybe if he rode upstream along the southern bank, he'd run into a trail. He let his voice trail off as he stared down at the ground. His dun picked up an optimistic rhythm when he saw the prints of several shod mounts etched in the forest duff along the river, heading upstream.

He'd just run into Lacy and the Greers' prints.

“Hyahh!”

He whipped the rein ends against the dun's flanks and tore off along the river. He followed the tracks that he lost a couple of times due to his speed and when the trees and brush thickened, but he picked up the sign once more along a faint game trail. The trace rose and fell through the rugged country that lifted steadily, sometimes steeply, back toward where he and Lacy had put in the river.

Several times he stopped to wave leafy branches across his and Lacy and the Greers' trail, trying to make it as hard as possible for Gunn and Cruz to follow.

At the top of a pass sheathed in firs and tamaracks, he paused to give the tired dun a breather. Quickly, he gathered dry wood in a nest of rocks and built a small fire. In the saddlebags and war sack he'd confiscated along with the fine coyote dun, he found a wealth of cooking supplies, grub, a bag of Arbuckles, and even a bottle of whiskey wrapped securely in a scrap of old quilt. He boiled coffee and drank it liberally fortified with the busthead, and had a satisfying lunch of the roasted rabbit—likely leftovers from the cutthroats' previous night's supper—which he found inside a peach tin.

When he'd finished his meal, the throbbing in his head had abated to a slight rapping that he could suppress beneath the prospect of running Lacy and her foolhardy companions to ground. As long as he could stay ahead of Gunn and Cruz. Staring along his back trail, he buckled the dun's latigo strap and shoved the bit into the horse's mouth, the dun swishing its tail and nickering skittishly at the stranger tending him.

Gunn and Cruz had probably run down their mounts by now and were hitting the trail hard. He had to assume they were behind him. They were too seasoned not to have picked up the sign despite Longarm's efforts to cover it.

He swung into the leather, touched the butt of the carbine poking up from the scabbard over the dun's right wither, and put the horse up the trail, casting frequent looks behind him. He kept a sharp eye ahead, as well, for Lacy and the Greers had only about a two-hour head start, and he doubted they were pushing as hard as he was. They likely figured he was dead by now and that Heck and Gunn were dancing over his bullet-torn carcass.

He followed the game path up a steep, grassy mountainside toward scattered pines and a black granite outcropping beyond. A rifle shot flatted out over the top of the ridge he was on. He reined the dun down quickly, shucked the carbine, and cocked it one-handed.